Adobe Systems Incorporated announced Adobe Tag Manager for the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture. This new solution provides a tag management framework for the entire Adobe Online Marketing Suite as well as for other digital marketing technologies. Capturing anonymous audience data is typically done using a tag (a small piece of JavaScript or HTML image call) placed in a piece of content or on a Web page. Various applications for capturing and taking action on analytics data usually require their own tags. The process of implementing and maintaining separate tags on a Web page and across partners such as analytics providers, site and content optimization vendors, ad servers, ad networks, affiliate networks and audience measurement firms often requires significant technical skills to implement or change and can become costly, time consuming and error prone. Adobe Tag Manager solves these industry problems with a tag management framework that serves as a tag container, housing the tags that an Adobe customer may require, including all Online Marketing Suite tags and third-party tags. While some customers may deploy a new standalone tag container, Adobe SiteCatalyst customers can deploy the tag container without having to change their existing SiteCatalyst page tag. The tags within the container are managed through an administrative user interface where the customer can insert or remove tags (from Adobe or other partners) without making changes to a website. http://www.adobe.com/
Category: Computing & data (Page 76 of 80)
Computing and data is a broad category. Our coverage of computing is largely limited to software, and we are mostly focused on unstructured data, semi-structured data, or mixed data that includes structured data.
Topics include computing platforms, analytics, data science, data modeling, database technologies, machine learning / AI, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, augmented reality, bots, programming languages, natural language processing applications such as machine translation, and knowledge graphs.
Related categories: Semantic technologies, Web technologies & information standards, and Internet and platforms.
A recent inquiry about a position requiring ETL (Extraction/Transformation/Loading) experience prompted me to survey the job market in this area. It was quite a surprise to see that there are many technical positions seeking this expertise, plus experience with SQL databases, and XML, mostly in healthcare, finance or with data warehouses. I am also observing an uptick in contract positions for metadata and taxonomy development.
My research on Semantic Software Technologies placed me on a path for reporters and bloggers to seek my thoughts on the Watson-Jeopardy story. Much has been written on the story but I wanted to try a fresh take on the meaning of it all. There is a connection to be made between the ETL field and building a knowledgebase with the smarts of Watson. Inspiration for innovation can be drawn from the Watson technology but there is a caveat; it involves the expenditure of serious mental and computing perspiration.
Besides baked-in intelligence for answering human questions using natural language processing (NLP) to search, an answer-platform like Watson requires tons of data. Also, data must be assembled in conceptually and contextually relevant databases for good answers to occur. When documents and other forms of electronic content are fed to a knowledgebase for semantic retrieval, finely crafted metadata (data describing the content) and excellent vocabulary control add enormous value. These two content enhancers, metadata and controlled vocabularies, can transform good search into excellent search.
The irony of current enterprise search is that information is in such abundance that it overwhelms rather than helps findability. Content and knowledge managers can’t possibly contribute the human resources needed to generate high quality metadata for everything in sight. But there are numerous techniques and technologies to supplement their work by explicitly exploiting the mountain of information.
Good content and knowledge managers know where to find top quality content but may not know that, for all common content formats, there are tools to extract key metadata embedded (but hidden) in it. Some of these tools can also text mine and analyze the content for additional intelligent descriptive data. When content collections are very large but too small to justify (under a million documents) the most sophisticated and complex semantic search engines, ETL tools can relieve pressure on metadata managers by automating a lot of mining, extracting entities and concepts needed for good categorization.
The ETL tool array is large and varied. Platform tools from Microsoft (SSIS) and IBM (DataStage) may be employed to extract, transform and load existing metadata. Other independent products such as those from Pervasive and SEAL may contribute value across a variety of platforms or functional areas from which content can be dramatically enhanced for better tagging and indexing. The call for ETL experts is usually expressed in terms of engineering functions who would be selecting, installing and implementing these products. However, it has to be stressed that subject and content experts are required to work with engineers. The role of the latter is to help tune and validate the extraction and transformation outcomes, making sure terminology fits function.
Entity extraction is one major outcome of text mining to support business analytics, but tools can do a lot more to put intelligence into play for semantic applications. Tools that act as filters and statistical analyzers of text data warehouses will help reveal terminology for use in building specialized controlled vocabularies for use in auto-categorization. A few vendors that are currently on my radar to help enterprises understand and leverage their content landscape include EntropySoft Content ETL, Information Extraction Systems, Intelligenx, ISYS Document Filters, RAMP, and XBS, something here for everyone.
The diversity of emerging applications is a leading indicator that there is a lot of innovation to come with all aspects of ETL. While RAMP is making headway with video, another firm with a local connection is Inforbix. I spoke with a co-founder, Oleg Shilovitsky for my semantic technology research last year before they launched. As he then asserted, it is critical to preserve, mine and leverage the data associated with design and manufacturing operations. This area has huge growth potential and Inforbix is now ready to address that market.
Readers who seek to leverage ETL and text mining will gain know-how from the cases presented at the 2011 Text Analytics Summit, May 18-19 in Boston. As well, the exhibits will feature products to consider for making piles of data a valuable knowledge asset. I’ll be interviewing experts who are speaking and exhibiting at that conference for a future piece. I hope readers will attend and seek me out to talk about your metadata management and text mining challenges. This will feed ideas for future posts.
Finally, I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. You will find other ideas and a nudge to action in these articles.
Boeri, Bob. Improving Findability Behind the Firewall, 28 slides. Enterprise Search Summit 2010, NY, 05/2010.
Farrell, Vickie. The Need for Active Metadata Integration: The Hard Boiled Truth. DM Direct Newsletter, 09/09/2005, 3p
McCreary, Dan. Entity Extraction and the Semantic Web, Semantic Universe, 01/01/2009
White, David. BI or bust? KMWorld, 10/28/2009, 3p.
The W3C’s Web Performance Working Group is working on a specification to define 20 “fine-grained” metrics to measure the duration of just about every aspect of a web user’s navigation behavior. The W3C’s working draft of the Navigation Timing Specification is in the “last call for comments” phase. After being finalized, it will specify 20 measurements for every page visited. http://test.w3.org/webperf/specs/NavigationTiming/
Rivet Software, the premier provider of standards-based business reporting and analytics, announced the release of Crossfire 3.0, an enhanced software platform that simplifies the process of SEC financial filings by managing the complicated preparation and review processes. Crossfire uses eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) technology to control document progression and centralize reviewers’ comments. Crossfire 3.0 is a standards-based reporting platform that specializes in internal and external financial reporting and analytics. Based on an XBRL framework, Crossfire 3.0 simplifies the user experience by eliminating the file management issue. Rivet’s integrated solution allows its customers to control the financial reporting cycle and comply with all SEC filing needs. Crossfire 3.0 includes an integrated Reviewer’s Guide that allows preparers and reviewers to closely collaborate across multiple iterations as the filing progresses from inception to completion. With this guide, users no longer need to interact with standalone documents to review XBRL tag selections and comment information. This “single document” system streamlines the process for reviewing and approving filings in a way not previously available. Crossfire 3.0 now preserves existing tags and comments when rolling forward from one filing to the next. When new data matches an XBRL tag from the previous quarter, Crossfire recognizes the match and automatically applies the tag throughout the document. The latest release of Crossfire allows users to change XBRL-tagged data in one location and instantly apply that change to exact-matched data throughout the entire document. Crossfire 3.0 includes the ability to split the XBRL templates so a filing can be worked on by different people in parallel. Once the separate pieces are complete, a user can simply merge them back into the master file. Crossfire 3.0 is supported by Rivet’s global professional services team 24 hours a day, seven days a week. www.rivetsoftware.com
TransPerfect, the privately held provider of translation services, announced the release of a new iPhone application for translation, which is available free to users. The application is called TransPerfect TransImage and it provides real-time machine translation via the device’s camera for users who come across text they would like to instantly understand. Machine translation has not yet advanced to a point where it can replace a human translator for mission critical content, but it can be an informative tool for getting the gist of content in another language. TransPerfect’s iPhone application leverages OCR (optical character recognition) and MT (machine translation) technology to form an application that takes text within a picture and translates it automatically. The current version includes support for 49 languages. The free application is now available from the Apple iTunes Store. www.transperfect.com.
Updated March 3, 2010
Government agencies produce a lot of information. Making it accessible to the public, which essentially paid for it, can be quite challenging. The volume is high. The formats are varied. Much of it remains locked in information silos.
Support is growing to take steps to make as much government information available to the public as possible. President Obama issued a directive describing the official policy for Transparency and Open Government that mandates an unprecedented level of accessibility to government information. At the same time, technical advances have improved the feasibility of increasing access to the data.
I recently completed a Gilbane paper on this topic and how some agencies are improving access to public data. It is now available for free on our Web site at https://gilbane.com/beacons.html. The paper’s sponsor, Mark Logic, has provided interesting case studies that illustrate the challenges and approaches to overcoming them. I also explore some of the major hurdles that need to be crossed to achieve this goal, including:
- Extremely high volumes of content and data
- Highly diverse, heterogeneous data formats and data models
- Complex content integration and delivery requirements
- Time-sensitivity of content
- Changing information environments
The approaches described have enabled that users of this technology to implement high-volume, disparate-data applications that not only overcome old technical barriers but also deliver new value to their organizations. This is, after all, the essence of open data – be it for open government, open publishing, or open enterprise.
I encourage you to read this paper to get a better understanding of what works to make government data more open.
Update: the Beacon is also available from Mark Logic.
Omniture, an Adobe company (NASDAQ:ADBE) announced an integration with CrownPeak that combines Omniture Test&Target with CrownPeak’s content management system (CMS) through Omniture Genesis. Designed to allow marketers to manage content for tests and targeted campaigns from an integrated interface, the combination allows for the creation and deployment of content to drive A/B tests, multivariate tests, and content targeting. As a result, marketers could benefit from the speed and control of Test&Target as well as from the content creation and management workflow of CrownPeak. Through the integration, content is built within CrownPeak’s CMS, then deployed and managed by Omniture Test&Target from within the CMS. The integration should provide the following: Continuous testing and targeting that can automatically promote top performing content; rapid implementation of integration and ongoing deployment of tests without requiring IT involvement, putting control in the hands of marketers; API Integration allows one-step live deployment of offers; easy management of any testing scenario via an integrated interface. www.omniture.com www.crownpeak.com/
Serendipity 1.5.2 has been released to address the outstanding issue of SQLite installations with Serendipity. Upgrading an earlier version of Serendipity prior to 1.5.1 to this version should work without any problems, fixing the database upgrades that were faulty in Serendipity 1.5.1. blog.s9y.org/
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